By now, many of you will have experienced the American Psychoanalytic Association's phenomenon: learning objectives. To be an accredited educational organization at the national level, APsaA must comply with the requirement to use specific learning goals in planning and appraising course efficacy. In our institutes and societies, analysts who plan courses for psychotherapy or psychoanalytic training programs must delineate goals of the educational experience. This requirement is true for continuing education programs as well. Whether having to write them for educational programs or having to complete course evaluation forms based on them, they have become part of our lives.
The move toward greater clarity and specificity of purpose follows a period of intense reexamination of psychoanalytic education. The use of pedagogical principles and, in particular, written learning objectives is one of many efforts to improve psychoanalytic training. Guidelines that are available for establishing objectives emphasize formulating outcomes that are observable by the presenter and/or the learner. For example, “the learner will be able to state the developmental tasks of latency” is more satisfactory than “the learner will know or understand them.”
Formerly serving as my society's continuing education (CE) program coordinator, I was responsible for requesting written objectives from instructors and presenters. There was a fair degree of confusion and uncertainty about translating course material into specific objectives. Some analytic educators found it difficult to formulate course content in this new way, especially when speaking of advanced clinical skills. Other colleagues were unsure how many objectives were needed to summarize a course. These reactions are not all that surprising. Often, what we do as analysts and analytic teachers cannot be easily translated into specific goals.
Recently, Deborah Cabaniss, the Columbia Task Force on Progression and Graduation, and the Multi-center Assessment Project, designed to assess the effectiveness of supervision, have endeavored to demystify and systematize psychoanalytic education. These efforts evolved from recognition that there was significant room for improvement in candidate training—a conviction Cabaniss and colleagues have contributed to with articles and institute workshops.
Recognition of the complexity of psychoanalytic praxis has long been a part of the structure of analytic training programs as well as a criterion in the selection of candidates. The combined requirements of coursework, training analysis, and supervision all contribute to a candidate's growing knowledge. We might say, though, that despite our best teaching efforts, an analyst's development is a process that progresses at an uneven pace for the trainee. Identification with one's analyst, supervisors, and teachers, the desire for their approval, the anxiety to feel that one knows something given the clinical responsibility we are taking on all shape the learning process. Even psychotherapy programs, whose goals can be more tightly focused, are subject to the limitations imposed by the complexity of the work and the idiosyncratic nature of the therapist's development.
It is time to deepen our understanding of the task before us of basing curricula on objectives. The reactions of colleagues that I encountered as CE coordinator are a natural outcome of the nature and complexity of our field. To speak to this, in this article, I offer a historical perspective on the learning objective movement, outline criticisms and controversies of the movement in the field of education, and introduce two newer taxonomic systems useful in describing goals that may help all of us approaching the task of formulating objectives.
While defining preparatory tasks has interested educators for centuries, an effort to do this in a comprehensive, research-based way began in the 1940s. At that time, a group of eminent scholars, among them Ralph Tyler, Benjamin Bloom, and David R. Krathwohl formed a committee to create a common language for educators to use in curriculum planning. They concluded the task could best be accomplished by defining outcomes that were behaviorally observable and thereby measurable psychometrically. The committee's original plan was for not one but three taxonomies, representing the basic domains of learning: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor.
Tessa Cochran, Ph.D., served as teaching analyst at the Baltimore Washington Center and clinical supervisor at GWU, before moving recently to Orleans, Cape Cod. A new member of BPSI, she will open an analytic and psychotherapy practice in 2014.
Michael Slevin, M.A., M.S.W., a former TAP editor, graduated as academic associate from the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he completed the Adult Psychotherapy Training Program. He works at Jewish Community Services of Baltimore and has a private practice.
After several years, the committee produced the first publication, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: the Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. This publication came to be known by the first editor's name, as Bloom's Taxonomy. The other two, affective capabilities and psychomotor skills, were each dealt with separately in later publications: Krathwohl's, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: the Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook II: The Affective Domain and E. J. Simpson's The Classification of Educational Objectives: Psychomotor Domain .
It is important to note several features of the committee's original intentions. First, they emphasized that all three domains were to be considered in planning curricula to cover the full array of requisite knowledge and abilities. Second, their efforts were to be considered a work in progress, one that should be revised over time. Third, as Bloom later clarifies: Each major field should have its own taxonomy of objectives in its own language—more detailed, closer to the special language and thinking of its experts.” As psychoanalytic educators, we take that recommendation into consideration as we approach the task of generating our own set of objectives.
Although a half-century of research findings demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in educational endeavors, the learning objectives movement has its critics. Even enthusiasts for using them were forthright about their limitations. In this section, I mention some of the arguments made in the field of education as a whole to raise questions as to whether they apply to curriculum planning in our field.
Some scholars raise arguments that not all important learning outcomes can be made explicit or operational. Learning experiences that involve implicit understanding cannot easily be described. In our field, for instance, abstract concepts such as transference, the unconscious, alpha and beta elements, or the analytic third can be difficult to grasp. Take, as an example, internalizing the concept of transference manifestations. Learning this concept involves repeated exposure to clinical material, accompanied by supervisors or teachers pointing out the resemblance between that material and information about the patients' early relationships. These help but comprehension also involves a cognitive shift from ordinary ways of considering discourse.
In a 1995 Psychoanalytic Quarterly article, Jacob Arlow describes this cognitive shift as developing a “working concept of the nature of the psychoanalytic situation.” He adds, “There is a considerable divergence between the articulated understanding of the nature of the psychoanalytic situation and free association, and an unacknowledged, guiding concept that emerges during the actual management of the clinical data.” He expresses this as an important caveat to be addressed in teaching and supervising candidates.
Further, critics of objective-based curricula argue that some learning activities are idiosyncratic and intended to change students in ways defined by the individual alone. Since each of us possesses a unique combination of capabilities, not all learning outcomes can be spelled out. We can speculate that the many new perspectives and innovations in psychoanalytic technique have emerged due in part to the unique talents candidates and analysts bring to bear on the field. Creative responses to patient encounters develop as a result of both what we are taught and what our distinctive combination of our abilities, opinions, and values gives rise to.
Other critics take issue with the emphasis on performance outcome rather than the pleasurable and creative aspects of the learning experience itself. These are exemplified in programs that emphasize the autonomy and self-directed intentions of students to seek what they need. Applying these viewpoints to psychoanalytic education, we might consider further implications of the fact that candidates come to our programs with advanced degrees and therefore bring with them a measure of sophistication as learners.
The accumulation of many years of experience and research with educational objectives has led to revisions of Bloom's original taxonomy, two of which offer promising systems for organizing psychoanalytic objectives. They are constructed with hierarchical categories from basic to more complex abilities as is Bloom's system. Yet, these taxonomies attempt to go beyond that early effort by incorporating research findings and updated thinking about learning processes. Both also include new conceptual foci especially pertinent to our field. One of these, called metacognition, pertains to the capacity for self-reflection regarding one's thought processes. Much of our clinical work depends on being able to observe ourselves, emotionally and cognitively, and to apply that understanding to patient encounters. The second taxonomy emphasizes the importance of the subject matter to the learner as well as his/her motivation to learn. The differences between the two lie in what categories the systems choose as the basic elements of learning.
Loren Anderson and Krathwohl, in 2001, edited A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing that identifies four major types of knowledge present in the cognitive processing of information.
Factual—including terminology, specific details and elements
Conceptual—incorporating classifications, principles, generalizations, theories and models
Procedural—how and when to apply knowledge and methods of inquiry
Metacognitive—strategic thinking as well as awareness of one's own cognition, i.e., the capacity to evaluate one's own thinking
Robert Marzano and John Kendall published Designing and Assessing Educational Objectives in 2008. They emphasize the levels of cognitive processing of information and also provide a more detailed look at the distinctions between cognitive and metacognitive tasks. Perhaps most important as a model for psychoanalytic education is their highest category, self-system thinking.
The six levels are:
Retrieval of information
Comprehension of content
Analysis—identifying similarities and differences, classifying categories, analyzing errors, and creating new generalizations
Knowledge utilization—decision making, problem solving, investigating, and experimenting
Metacognition—monitoring process, clarity, and accuracy
Self-system thinking—examination of a) importance of the information to the self; b) efficacy of one's competence or understanding and capacity to improve; c) emotional response to the learning experience or material; d) motivation to improve or understand the information or procedure.
To demonstrate the usefulness of both of these taxonomies, I have selected two learning objectives from the APsaA 2013 National Meeting. Each emphasizes different kinds and levels of learning.
The first, more characteristic of introductory courses, had as its goal that the successful learner could “describe several developmental features of preschool children that make play the preferable therapeutic technique.” This objective would be seen as demonstrating conceptual knowledge, using Anderson and Krathwohl's categories, since description requires familiarity with developmental stages and tasks as well. It also incorporates procedural knowledge (level 3), concerning the application of the play technique and its particular suitability to preschool aged children. In Marzano and Kendall's system, the session planners direct learners toward both content (level 2) as well as analysis (level 3) learning. The content level stresses knowing what developmental tasks are typically accomplished by preschool aged children, what research says concerning the ways preschool children are growing, and the nature of play as a therapeutic approach. Analysis of the information enters into consideration of play as contrasted with other technical interventions and the capacity to state advantages for children of that age group.
A second objective addressed skills required in many advanced clinical courses and relied on previously acquired learning. “Analyze clinical material so as to identify and evaluate the theory underlying the analyst's work.” This objective assumes the learner already can detail relevant factual information about the case being presented and can also comprehend the content of differing theoretical perspectives. Applying Anderson's classification, the emphasis is on procedural capabilities, discerning from the material which theoretical perspective is represented. Further, the objective involves the metacognitive skill of evaluating and articulating the usefulness of that particular theoretical perspective as compared with others.
With Marzano and Kendall's system, it is important to note that they use the term “analysis” in a different way than we do, as analytic teachers. We generally consider it to include investigation and generation of hypotheses (knowledge utilization) as well as consideration of the validity and clarity of our ideas (metacognition). The above objective incorporates both of these and more broadly the consideration of the value of the theoretical perspective to the learner (self-system thinking).
We are fortunate to be making progress toward greater clarity of definition in our educational endeavors through the use of learning objectives. Cabaniss and others have demonstrated that there are useful exercises that help students and candidates simulate clinical decision making. In these ways, candidates can practice in vivo skills before applying them. The groundbreaking efforts to improve psychoanalytic education have contributed to our ability to effectively describe the complex tasks of analytic work.
This is the job we have before us: carving out the higher ground between the pros and cons of educational objectives. Surely, our aim is to use objectives for what they can offer us in enhancing educational efforts, while keeping an eye to the fact that our goals are always larger We are still on a learning curve.